Learning Awareness Theoretical Description

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2.1.4 Learning Awareness

Lier 1996 states that to learn something new one must first notice it and the process of the noticing is an awareness of its existence, obtained, and enhanced by paying attention to it. Lier describes the idea further by giving an example of the experience of a man from New Guinea who was taken to big city to see the modern civilization by anthropologists. He was asked to observe the situation in the city. However, when the anthropologists asked him to tell what he had seen, he replied that he had been amazed by the strength of a skinny person pulling a cart that piled high with junk. The anthropologist asked him what else he had seen but he could not answer anything else. Hence, students have to notice and focus their attention to learn something new. This noticing and focusing can be described as awareness. To get further understanding of the meaning of awareness, Lier uses the following table. Table 2.1 Awareness Awareness Epistemology Axiology • Focusing attention • Role of perception • Know what you are doing, and why • Conscious engagement • Reflection Lier, 1996: 11 Hendricks 1981 defines awareness as willingness to examine all our values, beliefs, and past actions to see if they best serve our overall development. When students become aware of their learning, they find the truth about their learning. They examine their learning whether it meets their learning needs which lead them to take on the responsibility of the truth they have found. 16 Meanwhile, Saljo describes that when people become aware of their own learning in different respects, they will be better at handling learning and reading problems of the kinds encountered in everyday life, or at least, in every researching as cited by Smith 1990. Learning is something which can be discussed and analyzed. Becoming aware of the learning, students analyze their learning and find problems. They examine it and create solution to handle the problems. Thus, learning awareness gives benefits for the students. Putting aside the description of learning awareness, the following description addresses the avenues to awareness. Gebhard and Oprandy 1999 describe four avenues to awareness namely problem solving, seeing what happens, seeing what it is, and clarifying our feelings. The first avenue is problem solving. Being aware of the learning, students need to solve problems they face. As an instance, there is a student who got a bad mark for a particular subject. The student tries to understand what causes the bad mark. He finds that he rarely studies the subject. Then, he tries to solve the problem by studying more to understand better. Here, the students changes his behavior and sees what happens in his learning. He gains an awareness of his own learning and practice to solve his problems. The second avenue is seeing what happens. To see what happens in the learning can be done by trying the opposite to the usual things. For example, a student usually reads the materials before the class that helps him a lot in his learning. To see what happens in the learning, he needs to do the opposite by 17 coming to class without reading the materials in advance. Through this learning awareness can be obtained. The third avenue is seeing what it is. In this avenue, there are two-lane avenues to obtain the awareness. First is contrasting what we do with what we think we do. To accomplish this, keeping record of what we have done is needed. Here, students can obtain their learning awareness by writing a journal. The second lane is considering what we believe in light of what we do. It deals with finding out whether student’s beliefs match the actual processes or not. For example, a student believes that he has done the best he could in the exam. He believes that he will get an A. In fact, he doesn’t get A for his exam which is contradictory to his belief. Thus, to get the awareness of the learning, students can see what the learning is by contrasting what we do with what we think and considering what we believe in what we do. The last avenue to awareness is clarifying the feelings. By exploring their feelings of the learning, students are able to gain learning awareness. The feelings about thing are able to affect the behavior. Hence, clarifying the emotional side is needed. Personal journals are suited to this avenue.

2.2 Review of Related Studies